Tom Lehrer: Tom Lehrer Discovers Australia (And Vice Versa)

 

This is one of two Tom Lehrer albums that were not collected on the glorious Rhino box set The Remains of Tom Lehrer (hopefully my next blog post will be about the other one). They were no doubt omitted for the sake of redundancy, but since Tom gave up writing and performing so long ago and no new material will be forthcoming, fans justifiably tend to grab anything they can find with both hands. This Australian import from 1960, which I'd never seen in the wild before I scored a copy last month, is truly wonderful because the enthusiastic audience was well aware that this was no ordinary concert tour.

Before the live performances (Melbourne and Sydney) which form the backbone of this record, Tom had taken his little evening of sick-sick-sick humor to two other Australian cities only to fall under the censor's hammer. In Brisbane, where a year earlier someone tried (and failed) to have Tom's album Songs by Tom Lehrer banned throughout the country, Tom arrived to have the Police Commissioner threaten him not to play his tribute to the Boy Scouts, "Be Prepared". Tom played it anyway. Then in Adelaide a government official refused to let him perform unless he promised not to play five songs: "My Home Town", "The Irish Ballad", "When You Are Old and Gray", "I Hold Your Hand in Mine", and "Be Prepared". (An Adelaide newspaper printed the full lyrics to "I Hold Your Hand in Mine" and was not prosecuted.) So of course all Tom had to say before the final cut on this record was "And now, a song dedicated to the Boy Scouts of America" to get the Melbourne/Sydney audiences to erupt in cheers.

As Tom explains after performing "I Hold Your Hand in Mine", his tender ode to necrophilia: "I have always regarded it as part of my mission in life to follow around after Billy Graham and try and undo some of the work he's done."

Introduction
I Wanna Go Back to Dixie
The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be
Fight Fiercely, Harvard
The Hunting Song
Lobachevsky
The Irish Ballad
When You Are Old and Grey
My Home Town
The Old Dope Peddler
The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz
I Hold Your Hand in Mine
Be Prepared

Album audio & artwork 

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Jerry Rayson: The Weird Thing in Town

 

 

 

 

 

I first read about Jerry Rayson in the book Enjoy the Experience, a survey of private press LPs in the United States. Supercollector Paul Major of New York wrote about Rayson's record The Weird Thing in Town:

It's incredibly scarce, and Major's description of it naturally drove up demand, which is why Craig Moerer (RecordsByMail) wants $1500 for a copy on eBay, and Bananas Records wants $1200 for a copy on Discogs.

A few years ago Major liquidated his collection, and his copy of The Weird Thing in Town (with Jerry's handwritten note "ONLY FOR DJ - P.L.C. - JERRY" on the back) ended up at Rockaway Records in L.A., where I bought it.

Is it any good? "Good" isn't really the right adjective. In fact adjectives are not the best approach. Analyzing this record is like criticizing a swarm of bees. For this slab of outsider wax, Jerry assigned his own imprint Psychedelic Worlds Records (spelled "Physcadelic" elsewhere on the cover), and Jerry's cover essay lays out his desire to create his own musical style, "Rocbuafro", with elements of rock and African and Caribbean. It's primitive, noisy, and 100% improvised, with barely-under-control vocals over bursts of insane kinetic energy on guitar and drums. There are at least three cuts where he might be playing on top of other records.

Almost nothing is known about Jerry beyond what anyone can glean from the content of the package. Many have guessed that he was Puerto Rican and that Rayson was not his real last name. No one is certain when the album was released, with guesses ranging from 1969 to 1974. I've found no credible evidence that he's either alive or dead. Jerry included his telephone number in the cover art, a tantalizing clue that unfortunately dead-ended when a very helpful New York Public Library reference librarian advised me that the most recent NYC phone directory that's been digitized dates from 1960.

A Long Beach journalist/collector/researcher named Matvei Procak posted on Ancestry.com in 2006 asking if anyone had heard of Jerry Rayson. Rayson describes himself as a painter in his essay on the cover of the LP, and Procak's post suggests he had excavated some of his paintings. Procak is the researcher who made possible reissues of scarce folk records Ode to Quetzalcoatl by Dave Bixby and Second Coming by Harbinger, both released by Spanish label Guerssen in 2009. Unfortunately I'm unable to track down Procak, and Guerssen has lost touch with him.

The site Hippedelic lists an old sale page for a bundle of Jerry Rayson materials, including the LP, a single, a promotional photo, and a photocollaged painting, which taken together offer the only known photos of Rayson:

 

 

 

I've trawled the Internet for photos of various copies of the record, and I see four variants of the cover - black on white, black on red, black on green, and blue on white. Some are hand-colored. Some have glitter applied. There are also many examples of unpasted cover art that (presumably) Rayson collaged into art projects, trimming the four corners and then taking a black or silver circular backing and gluing the result to it, or gluing the four trims on the backing arranged in a mandala.

The assignment of tracks to track names is...problematic. Neither side of the record is banded. Side A is pretty straightforward: the jacket and the label confirm side A tracks are "My New York Woman" ("Women" on the label), "Oye Boogaloo Nena", "El Bacelon de lo Junkie", "Yo Soy de mi Patria", and "Rocbuafro with L.S.D.". This jives with the sounds you hear on side A: there are five tracks separated by silences, and though three of the songs never reference the title in the lyrics, "My New York Woman" and "El Bacelon de lo Junkie" are strong matches between title and lyrics.

Side B is definitely indexed incorrectly. The jacket and label say side B tracks are "Maybelle", "Espaco—With Space", "Do the Boogaloo", "Mama Lim Papa Limbo", and "Moyca Dance Rocbuafro"; however after listening to the lyrics it's clear that track 1 is "Espaco—With Space", track 2 is "Do the Boogaloo", track 3/4 is "Mama Lim Papa Limbo" and "Moyca Dance Rocbuafro" (which run together without silence in between, but with a clear demarcation between tracks at the 3:51 mark), and track 5 is...something. Nowhere in the lyrics of track 5 is the word "Maybelle" mentioned, but "Maybelle" is the last remaining unused track title we can assign to it, and the lyrics of three side A tracks had no relation to the title of the song either, so...I've assigned "Maybelle" as the name of the last track on side B.

There are two known singles from this album, "Oye Boogaloo Nena" b/w "Maybelle" and "My New York Woman" b/w "Do The Boogaloo". They might resolve this issue fairly quickly, but I don't have those singles. After being slightly obsessed with this album for several years I'm no longer in need of any quick solutions to its mysteries! If you do have any hard information about this artist or album, though, I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Leonid Hambro & Gershon Kingsley: Gershwin—Alive & Well & Underground

 

You've seen it for $8 in every Lounge/Exotica bin in every record store you've ever visited...but you never bought it. So here it is! And it turns out it's pretty good! Hambro plays piano and Kingsley plays all the synths in this deathless classic from the height of Moog Madness.

Rhapsody in Blue
I Got Rhythm
Porgy and Bess Introduction and Opening Scene I
Summertime
My Man's Gone Now
It Ain't Necessarily So
Clara, Clara
Crown's Killing

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.

Virginia Carter Stumbough: Three Bugs in a Rug

Around 1942, my grandmother Virginia Carter Stumbough wrote a children’s book, Three Bugs in a Rug. Her children Gene Nora (age 5) and John Charles (age 7) did the drawings. It’s the story of three bugs, Eenie, Meenie, and Minie, who live in a rug in a woman’s house, and who have to grab their beds and run for their lives when she does spring cleaning. It’s charming as all get out and I’ve restored it and made it into a downloadable PDF.

The backstory will be interesting to people in the children’s book industry or just anyone curious about what it took to get a book made in the 1940s:

Virginia was a precocious writer, and was a pro as early as high school and as late as age 84. At the time she wrote Three Bugs in a Rug, she, her husband Harold, and their two children were living in Evanston, Illinois. She shopped around the manuscript and eventually signed a deal with the David McKay Company of Philadelphia on April 10, 1943.

Company founder David McKay was described in his 1918 obituary as “one of the best-known publishers of juvenile books in [Philadelphia]”. He entered the business in 1882 when he published Walt Whitman’s semiautobiographical book of essays Specimen Days and Collect, and in the years that followed published several more books by and about his friend Whitman including a biography in 1883, Whitman’s late poetry collection November Boughs in 1888, and a revised posthumous edition of Leaves of Grass in 1900.

 

Some of the children’s titles by which the publishing house earned their reputation included Story of Little Metzu: The Japanese Boy by Helen Campbell (1914); Boys and Girls of Bookland by Nora Archibald Smith (1923); Scoot McKay by David William Moore (1939); From Nags to Riches by Alan Smith (1942); and Ride, Cowboy, Ride! by Billy Warren (1946).

When Virginia submitted her manuscript to McKay (a black-and-white photocopy survives), the original children’s drawings were part of the pitch. McKay, it turns out, credited the book’s art to the children even though they didn’t actually use their drawings—no doubt because they were bona fide kiddie scribbles of the kind that would make any book editor think twice about spending good money to reproduce them a thousand times. Below are scans of the photocopied original art for one spread, and the final color published versions. (This may be apocryphal, but Virginia once told me that one reason the book wasn’t a big success was that some bluenose librarian decided that the safety pin holding together Minie’s diaper was a penis, and had the book banned.)

 

In fairness to the unnamed McKay staff artists who drew the replacement art, they did an excellent job aping the kids’ style. Also, by making new art from scratch, they were able to make every art element either black, purple, red, or green, and then print using a 4-color black/purple/red/green process rather than CMYK, avoiding the need to use halftone to create composite colors. The final book contains very little use of halftone and the results are nice and sharp.

The book was intended for publication in time for Christmas 1943, but the U.S. government commandeered the printer to make publications supporting the war effort, and the pressing was delayed. It debuted around May 1944, and retailed for $1. The book was manufactured by Kingsport Press (offices in New York and Chicago, pressing plant in Tennessee).

I’ve found four press breaks for the book: two from newspapers that reviewed it (Chicago Tribune, 7/9/1944, and Springfield Daily News, 9/12/1944) and two from newspapers who noted it had been added to their local libraries (Carbondalle, IL Free Press, 6/3/1944, and San Bernardino County Sun, 9/9/1944).

Like so many books, it sold but it wasn’t a hit. It reached end-of-life around the beginning of 1949; in January of that year McKay Company treasurer Charles Cridland wrote to Virginia saying no copies had sold in the last six months, and suggested remaindering the last 250 unsold copies (thus putting an end to her royalty stream). 

McKay eventually sold them to Imperial Book Company of Philadelphia (I can’t find much information about them; presumably they were a remainder distributor). Virginia did write to McKay hoping that the remaindered copies could go to her hometown Evanston Book Store at $0.10 a copy, but McKay got a better deal from Imperial.

 

A year later, the David McKay Company experienced a regime change at the hands of two industry players from New York, Kennett Rawson and Quentin Bossi:

Kennett Rawson (who at age 14 went on an Arctic expedition!) (that his dad paid for!) was vice president and editor-in-chief at G.P. Putnam’s Sons in New York City. Quentin Bossi (who at age 18 was a golf prodigy!) was vice president of sales at Putnam’s. In 1950 these two well-funded men of the publishing gentry abandoned Putnam’s and bought the David McKay Company. Alex McKay, son of David and president of the company for 32 years, was kicked to the curb. (He founded a new company, Bell Publishing, and died three years later.)

On June 30 1950 the McKay company wrote to Virginia to let her know the company had been sold, it was now in the process of liquidation, and they were assigning the book’s copyright to her. Virginia wrote to the Library of Congress to have them record the copyright, which they did on Sept. 25, 1950.

 

After recording the copyright, Virginia wrote to the McKay company asking, presumably, if she could claim the plates used to press the book (no copy of that letter survives). Cridland at McKay wrote back to her on 9/6/1950 to say, basically, “No.” His explanation for why McKay can’t help is somewhat tortured, but it does provide some insight into the very heavy footprint, then and now, of the gear required to mass-produce a physical book.

 

The book has never returned to print. Virginia died in 2001. Today there are no copies listed on eBay, Alibris, or ABEBooks, and almost no Google results. But Mom (Gene Nora) made sure both her kids and all her grandkids got copies.

Three Bugs in a Rug (facsimile edition)